Frank Lee Smith

After fourteen years on Florida's death row, Frank Lee Smith died of cancer on January 30, 2000, before he was exonerated of rape and murder. On April 15, 1985, the eight year old victim died from injuries sustained from an attack in her home by a burglar. Repetitive blows from a blunt object, later found to be a rock, in addition to attempted strangulation, contributed to the victim's death. An autopsy revealed that the victim had been raped and sodomized. Through shaky eyewitness descriptions from neighbors, Chiquita Lowe and Gerald Davis, as well as the victim's mother, the investigation came to be centered on a black male, about six feet tall, with muscular upper arms, shoulders and chest, a dark complexion, about thirty years old, and wearing an orange t-shirt and jeans. Lowe testified that, on her way home, she was flagged down by an unidentified black male with a full beard, scraggly hair, and a droopy eye. From a composite sketch the police put together with Davis and Lowe, Frank Lee Smith was arrested on April 29, 1985.

The prosecution relied on the identification of Smith by the victim's mother and Smith's criminal history. She identified him as the man she saw leaving her home through the living room window on the night of the murder. At trial, the defense's insanity plea failed and the jury unanimously recommended the death penalty. Although former Governor Bob Martinez signed a death warrant in 1989, Smith was able to win a stay of execution in January 1990. In 1998, the state Supreme Court ordered a trial judge to hold an evidentiary hearing based on Smith's claim of new evidence, which had nothing to do with DNA evidence. During this trial, three witnesses including the victim's mother, testified against Smith. But eyewitness Lowe changed her story, having been shown a picture of another suspect by a defense investigator, and the defense began requesting DNA testing. Only after Smith's death was a blood sample from Smith obtained by the state prosecutor's office, which was then tested against a semen sample taken from the victim's vagina. The samples were sent to the FBI laboratory, which reported that Frank Lee Smith was excluded as the depositor of the semen.

On December 15, 2000, eleven months after his death, and fourteen years after his 1986 conviction, Frank Lee Smith was exonerated based on exculpatory DNA testing results. These results not only cleared Smith of the crime, but identified the true perpetrator, Eddie Lee Mosley, a convicted rapist and murderer, currently living in the Tacachale State Center for intellectually disabled defendants in Gainesville, Florida.

DNA testing implicating Mosley was first presented in the case of Jerry Frank Townsend, who spent twenty-two years in prison after confessing to two crimes he didn't commit. Smith's heirs settled a wrongful conviction lawsuit against the Broward County Sheriff's Office in 2013 for $340,000.

About the Registry

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence. The Registry also maintains a more limited database of known exonerations prior to 1989.

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We welcome new information from any source about exonerations already on our list and about cases not in the Registry that might be exonerations.